Journalism requires its practitioners to inevitably report the news of allegations and criticisms of a wide swath of humanity ranging from the likes of criminal defendants to public officials (OK, sometimes the swath is not so wide).

Thus, it’s only fair to use this space for a confession of my own:

I’ve caused my girlfriend to become addicted to The Legend of Zelda.

I don’t consider myself a prophet (although others thought I was mad for declaring openly that I expected you-know-who to win the last presidential election), and I wouldn’t have had any cause to think of myself as a pusher until these few past weeks.

Video games, however, have barely entered our relationship other than a one-day excursion into the Mass Effect galaxy and a few rounds of Mario Kart. I’d be happy to waste time inside the worlds of Nintendo, Xbox or PlayStation, but those weren’t places we would journey together.

That was still the case during the first weekend of March, when “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild” was newly released and she somehow let me get away with spending nearly an entire Saturday in scaling digital cliffs, searching an imaginary world for puzzle-filled shrines and bashing pig- and lizard-faced villains with swords, axes and other instruments of mayhem.

It was so exciting she fell asleep while I spent hours saving the Zora. (In case you’re somehow a functioning human who doesn’t yet know about this, the Zora are a race of humanoid fish characters who sometimes need a dashing outsider to save them from calamities.)

It makes sense if you’re into this Zelda thing, which I have been since I received the franchise’s first installment for Christmas in 1989 or so. The lady in my life, however, has been free of this kind addiction until I left my console and the game in her possession and suggested that if she got bored, she could give the game a try.

To my surprise, she did. Even after accusing the legendary Zelda of being “the other woman.”

But perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. The game’s art style is worthy of the many comparisons made to Studio Ghibli animation and its designers also created an appealing version of the “open world” game. Players can let their character walk around a vast landscape and do whatever they want while exploring grassland, swamp, desert, snowy mountains and forests.

And then there’s the shrines. More than a hundred of them are scattered across that landscape and each presents a different puzzle demanding players to figure out a solution by using such powers as magnetism, the ability to add momentum to a static object or simply blowing things up.

The upshot is that players have repeated chances to overcome a different bite-sized challenge and are then motivated to continue playing, even until 4 a.m.

It also means my co-workers openly wondered if they needed to report me to Homeland Security after overhearing a phone conversation between my girlfriend and me about a puzzle involving bombs.

Eventually of course, we’ll move on from spending too much of our free time with the game. But if I can solve a few dozen shrine puzzles, I can plan an interesting date again.

Andrew Edwards is part of the Southern California News Group's business team and focuses on housing stories for the Inland Empire. He's based at the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin and has also worked for publications including the Long Beach Press-Telegram and The San Bernardino Sun. He graduated from UCLA in 2003 after studying political science and history.